I'm kind of curious... It seems like the MPEG-LA is doing great work by creating all these video and audio compression codecs. MP3 is used by everybody, MPEG2

I'm kind of curious... It seems like the MPEG-LA is doing great work by creating all these video and audio compression codecs. MP3 is used by everybody, MPEG2 was good for the day, and now H.264 is even better. Plus, nobody else seems to be coming up with something compelling. Sure, there's WebM and VP8, but if I recall correctly, they are, at best, at parity with H.264. It seems like here's a good case of patents being useful: the MPEG people do research and create great codecs and we all pay them a $1 (or something) in licensing fees so we get small video. I'm all for open standards and free and Free software, but it seems like H.264 is a net will, compared to what we'd have without it. (Remember the days of huge .wav files and electronic .mod files before MP3 came out?)